OSEC

Neohapsis is currently accepting applications for employment. For more information, please visit our website www.neohapsis.com or email hr@neohapsis.com
Bugtraq archives for 4th quarter (Oct-Dec) 1994: Re: a program named spoon

Re: a program named spoon

Jason Matthews (jasondickory.sdsu.edu)
Tue, 6 Dec 1994 00:23:07 -0800 (PST) 

On Mon, 5 Dec 1994, Doug Hughes wrote:

> I remember something about a program named spoon. Seems to be a
> hacker C program of some sort that eats up a systems resources.
> Does anybody know the origin of this program? We've discovered
> a couple of users with binary only and were wondering exactly
> what it does. Source would be helpful, but not necessary. I'm
> guessing it mallocs all available memory for a specified period
> of time.  
>  Was it this list?

I have two guesses:
	1) It forks repeatedly thereby consuming resources.
	2) It makes use of malloc() and allocates all the available
	   virtual memory until it detects it is within a certain percentage
	   of the physical limit and idles in the background.

BTW, are you sure this is not some sort of page bomb where the program
allocates and then deallocates memory in attempt to force the kernel to
'kill' processes.


Jason

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
jasondickory.sdsu.edu			  San Diego State University
jasonmentor.sdsu.edu   		    College of Engineering
jasonBOOM.extern.ucsd.edu               Electrical*Computer Engineering 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
	  The following email address are no longer valid
	              odnLoD.amaranth.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------